Medieval Music in Britain, not an everyday subject and not easy to find good sources on for those of us working outside the closed doors of those ivory towers, but what a find this is. Just a quick blog post to share this excellent resource. Working across our ArtsDesign Media and Music Timeline, its going to be a very handy reference I suspect. Published in 1959, its almost impossible to know whats out there without a ‘crystal ball.’ This is definitely my find of the week, possibly the month and it is only 1st April, hmmn April fools day I know but hopefully his text is not going to trip us up.

We will update this post with a pointer on the gems inside but you can also flick on the embedded object straight to the Contents table. If you are interested in the wonders of Sacred Music, Polyphony and the wonders that led to the masterpieces of William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, you could do worse than take a pitstop and browse right here. Delightful start to the day for me.

From the internet archive you can download in a variety of formats, you can store the citations of the book using Zotero or similar, to add the references to your own citations library and research index. There is one more easy to use treat, go to the World Catalog and you can send the full book to your Kindle, other ebook formats supported, on both sites.

Sadly most of the British Educational institutions do not share the open and sharing ethos of the American institutions and are hidden behind virtual ivory walls including some collections funded by the nation. Right that is my gripe for the day over with but I can at least about polyphony post Norman Conquest in the spring sunshine, with no glare on my Kindle.

However obscure your interests or oblique your take is on a subject if you are looking for older sources and open access, it ia always worth a search on the Internet Archive and Gutenberg projects. What examples they are to us all. We have started chronologically indexing resources we find to share more widely. You will find the start of this sub-project on Intriguing History right here. Its an easy and fast to search table with a brief note on each resource and links either directly to the resource or with a short post and a few pointers on what we have found out about the resource and its relevance to our particular projects, historic themes periods, places and centuries.